Review: Face "Cean Fantasy With A Very Light Touch"

Book review: The Face in the FrostYears ago, on a rainy day, I had a bad cold and felt miserable at the thought of going to work in the office of the pallet factory where I then helped to get our living. My dear husband, sympathizing with me most kindly, and despite the fact that it would mean a lost day of much-needed wages, encouraged me to stay home and take care of myself. He then handed me a little paperback for sheerly fun reading. I still associate it with that day--the rain streaming down outside, myself inside and warm, playing hooky from a hated job. Perhaps I shall have to spend some time in the Purgatorial circle of the slothful for it, but it was a great day.

The book is The Face in the Frost, by John Bellairs. I have it in this tacky 1970's edition. Never mind the front cover and the silly comparisons to Tolkien. (Don't all fantasy blurbs do that?) If you have any taste for clean fantasy with a very light touch, or think you might, this book is for you. There's no blood, no gore, and almost no females. But it gets plenty spooky, nonetheless. Prospero and Roger Bacon, wizards, are the main characters, and their friendship gives the book its greatest charm. The stolen names are an example of Bellairs' great fun with time, place, and literary allusion. He deliberately sets the book in a no-where's-land called The South Kingdom, south of The North Kingdom, though England does apparently exist in his world. (Roger Bacon has recently been there.) Prospero lives in a Victorian house full of gadgets and tacky Victorian furniture and has a talking mirror who watches 20th century Chicago Cubs games telepathically. At one point the two wizards travel in an Amish buggy made by casting a spell on a squash. I suspect that some of this topsy-turvy use of anachronism was suggested to Bellairs by T. H. White's Once and Future King, where I seem to recall that Merlin has a similar relationship to time. But Bellairs does it better and is much funnier.

In case this bothers you, I should mention that the book treats religion fairly lightly, though with no malice. Prayer books, for example, are used as sources of quasi-spells to ward off evil things that walk by night, not actually to pray, and one of the things mentioned (which always makes me laugh) on the first page is that Roger and Prospero know all the verses to the Dies Irae.

If you're feeling blue about what's wrong with the world, and if this sounds like the sort of book you might enjoy, I suggest you get a copy out of the library and settle down somewhere comfortable with it. It works best for cheering you up if taken with hot chocolate, though for that you may need to wait until autumn.

Lydia McGrew

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